Mapping Irish Theatre
Mapping Irish Theatre
Shaun Richards, St Mary's University College, London
Seamus Heaney once described the 'sense of place' generated by the early Abbey theatre as the 'imaginative protein' of later Irish writing. Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, Mapping Irish Theatre argues that theatre is 'a machine for making place from space'. Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book investigates how this Irish 'sense of place' was both produced by, and produced, the remarkable work of the Irish Revival, before considering what happens when this spatial formation begins to fade. Exploring more recent site-specific and place-specific theatre alongside canonical works of Irish theatre by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, the study proposes an original theory of theatrical space and theatrical identification, whose application extends beyond Irish theatre, and will be useful for all theatre scholars.
- Develops an original approach to Irish theatre, proposing an alternative way of reading key canonical works of Irish theatre which will make it essential reading within Irish studies
- Engages with key thinkers on space and place from geography and philosophy
- Presents an original theoretical method for analysing theatre, which could be extended to any theatre culture and therefore has importance in the wider field of theatre studies
Product details
February 2017Paperback
9781316639580
230 pages
230 × 153 × 14 mm
0.34kg
7 b/w illus. 3 maps
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Making space
- 2. Staging place
- 3. Spaces of modernity and modernism
- 4. The calamity of yesterday
- 5. The fluorescence of place
- 6. Theatre of the world
- 7. Theatre of the street
- Conclusion: spectral spaces.
